Identification and characterization of Lexical Semantic Change
an analysis in the Portuguese language
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.21814/lm.18.2.503Keywords:
language models, lexical semantic change, embeddings, semantic spaceAbstract
This study describes a comparative methodology for identifying and characterizing Lexical Semantic Change (LSC) in Portuguese, integrating both Static Language Models and Contextual Language Models, fine-tuned on diachronic corpora (ALiB-Twitter and Tycholina). Our findings describe that although static models (Word2Vec/FastText) are effective for quantifying global transformations, their sensitivity is limited by noisy corpora and by the challenge of representing polysemy. On the other hand, contextual models are capable of capturing subtle usage shifts, characterizing pejoration and sense broadening, with qualitative human validation.
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Copyright (c) 2026 Laila Mota, Eloize R. Marques Seno, Rerisson Cavalcante, Daniela Barreiro Claro
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